Wednesday, June 8, 2016

Getting nailed by those badge-wearing bumpkins not only cost me my hot-assed old school Suzuki but their petty jealousies have been following me around, cramp the fuck out of my style, like a wet sack of shit across the neck. Everything goes wrong; missed chances, sub-par dope, strings of minor but galling hassles.

I’m beset with logistical snags, flat tires and dropped calls. Regulars badger for fronts of my badly cut dope then take their cash elsewhere. I’ve scrambled all over for a decent wholesale connection but keep rolling snake-eyed paper thin puppets who know a guy who knows a guy who knows some other fucking guy ad infinitum.

Years ago, a couple boatloads of Persian traders alighted on our fair shores and filled this three-legged town with brown magic from the fabled hills of Ariana. After their top dogs made a great show of opening vast and glittering discos, they promptly blew themselves up by becoming their own best customers.

Stalwart wops whose forefathers literally built this burgh─even they’ve lost the way, victims of hubris and canny TV producers. They pigged out on the illustrious Sicilian tit for centuries but too much media fawning turned them into a herd of useless Gotti mimics who tried to leverage Omerta into a household name.

Inbred racist bikers step into the breach now and again, reaching toward this cosmopolis from their surrounding hick town bunkers. Too often their success results in inexplicable farmhouse bloodbaths. Police are left to puzzle over mutilated bodies strewn about after a drunken argument involving some arcane point of order escalates into close range shotguns, crossbows and Bowie knives.

I did have high hopes for a gang of slick West Africans after they’d carved out territory in the east end. Not only were they stylish, happily venal and worldly, their pipeline was based on long established clan ties and appeared rock solid. However, as so many who’d sought to become the gods they once feared, these intrepid sons of the mother continent became infected with fetishistic consumerism. Looking to maximize revenue, they developed a rep for poisoning their clientele after diluting the product with mislabeled industrial effluents. This led to several intramural gun battles, leaving their sleek and shapely network a smoking ruin.

So it’s been back to the Saint Clair Porkchops. Stone headed men who beat each other senseless in front of street corner sports bars then stagger home to their mothers’ basements, not twenty doors away. They always have stuff but quality is inconsistent, watered down with the usual shortsighted greed and small time turf wars.

Desperate men do desperately stupid things so I go see an old witch on Dundas West, in the dead zone between Lansdowne and Roncesvalles. I’ve passed her sign a million times: Love Problems and Money.

She’s reputed to be the spiritual and titular descendant of the original Madame Schontz, a renowned Gypsy priestess who star centerman Dave Keon hired in 1969 to put an eternal curse on the Maple Leafs after they’d blackballed him at the peak of his impressive career. The team was condemned to never win another Cup, no matter how much coin they blow on superstars come and gone. So far so good. They’ve managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in a dozen inconceivable ways so I figure what the hell, Madame Schontz Junior is worth a shot. And what’s a hundred bucks? I blow a hundred bucks before I’m out the door these days. Just think about money and you’ve blown a hundred bucks.

A note taped to her doorway sends me around to a back alley. I knock and a suspicious young muzhyk woman opens up a crack. She looks past me and narrows her eyes, sniffs my air. “Nobody home.” I show her some cash. “I need to see Madame Schontz. Immediately.” The woman’s face off-gases about ten years and sixteen tons as she lets me in. “I’m the daughter,” she reports, poking a finger between her Double Dees, frayed bra straps cantilevered outward. She leads me into a musty hallway converted to a tiny kitchen. We’re pushed up against one another, her knockers pressed into my navel. She gestures further down the corridor. A Socialist Realism Christ on an ancient calendar hangs near the ceiling. We go by a derelict dumbwaiter. I half expect an arm to burst out and brain me with a skillet.

The daughter steers me into a dim backroom, small as a doghouse. Madame Schontz is a four-foot high pyramid of quivering flab wrapped in a sateen Blue Jays jacket, topped with a big pork roast face and pink visor hat. Hunkered on a rug, I can’t tell if she’s got legs or not. She toys with a few playing cards and some yellow dog’s teeth scattered on an overturned plastic bucket. I crouch down and the daughter offers to interpret. She squeezes in beside me and lays her chin on my shoulder. In the mirror behind Madame Schontz, we’re a two-headed Diane Arbus freak.

I’m a drug dealer, I explain, but having a truly shitty time finding decent drugs at a good price and it’s not only ruining my rep but alienating the most important sector of my customer base; a carefully cultivated collection of successful fags, lawyers, academics, arts parasites, petty government asswipes and other sundry middle class degenerates.

The daughter asks me to write down the drugs I’d like to procure. Just two, I tell her: Clean Colombian Flake and Sweet Brown Afghani H, the old fashioned stuff, if Madame would be so kind. The type processed with ether instead of the kerosene or diesel used nowadays by those cheap-ass CIA toadies. And some good sticky bud wouldn’t hurt either but not absolutely necessary since I’ve got weed more or less covered. And please, no pills or other pharmaceuticals. I find them gauche.

My c-note disappears down the daughter’s cleavage as she hands the scrap of paper to her mother. The old woman rubs it on her forehead and on her desiccated neck flab, chews it up and swallows. In about ten seconds she begins to tremble and sweat and jabber in several tongues.

Her nose runs, she pumps at her ears as if they’re ringing. Her hands twitch, she puffs on an invisible cigarette. Madame Schontz goes bug-eyed, cackles, yells and nods madly. She’s ecstatic and inspired. I smell it, a high Andean clean smell, a cold wind clears the sinuses. She laughs, haughty and luxurious. She freezes.

After some long moments, her eyelids begin to hang, blob body sagging in stages. She smacks her lips and savors a deep earthy flavor. She claws at herself sensually, murmurs with pleasure. I watch her lean forward in tiny increments, finally at a steep angle, her face not quite touching the plastic bucket.

“You mean like this?” the daughter asks. “Yeah,” I point. “Exactly like this. What she’s high on, that’s what I need. And the thing before.” Madame Schontz snaps out of it and her closed lipped smile beams at me with a heartfelt munificence. Her personal style might be more street corner Carnac than Oracle of Delphi but this bewitched babushka appears to be onto something.

“Go live your life,” her daughter tells me as I unfold myself from their lair.

From Excessica Books...

Excerpt from new novel...

Getting nailed by those badge-wearing bumpkins not only cost me my hot-assed old school Suzuki but their petty jealousies have been following me around, cramp the fuck out of my style, like a wet sack of shit across the neck. Everything goes wrong; missed chances, sub-par dope, strings of minor but galling hassles... READ MORE